The research team, led by Hualong Qiang and corresponding author Huiping Wang, surveyed two hundred adult patients scheduled for elective surgery across multiple surgical specialties between February 2024 and March 2025. Engagement was defined operationally as participation in at least one preoperative experience service, whether an education class, a counseling session or a prehabilitation program. Using structured questionnaires, the researchers collected data on demographics, clinical factors and patients’ own perceptions of the barriers and facilitators shaping their decisions. To add texture to the numbers, the team also analyzed open-ended responses with descriptive qualitative content analysis, allowing patients to explain in their own words why they did or did not show up. The study received ethical approval from the Ethics Committee of The Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University and was conducted under the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki, with written informed consent from all participants.

The headline number is sobering: only 59.5 percent of patients — 119 of the 200 surveyed — engaged with any preoperative service. That means roughly two in five patients walked into the operating room without the preparation these programs are designed to provide. More striking still was the variation across surgical specialties. Cardiac surgery patients engaged at a rate of 82.4 percent, while neurosurgery patients engaged at only 40.0 percent. This nearly twofold difference hints that the perceived stakes of an operation, the culture of each surgical department, and perhaps the intensity of preoperative counseling routines all shape whether patients seek out preparation services. A patient facing open-heart surgery may feel an obvious urgency to prepare; a patient scheduled for a neurosurgical procedure may, paradoxically, receive less structured encouragement or may respond to fear with avoidance.

When the researchers examined why patients stayed away, two barriers towered above the rest: time and distance. Among patients who did not engage, 69.1 percent reported time constraints, compared with 27.7 percent of those who did engage — a difference that was highly statistically significant. Difficulty traveling to the hospital told a similar story, cited by 54.3 percent of non-engaged patients versus 19.3 percent of engaged patients. In other words, the patients most likely to skip preoperative services were those juggling work obligations or living far from the hospital, precisely the populations that may also face challenges attending follow-up appointments after surgery. These are not exotic findings, but their quantification matters: they suggest that the decision to engage is often a simple cost-benefit calculation about time and transportation, not a considered rejection of medical advice.

Beyond logistics, the survey identified informational and motivational barriers that were significantly more common among non-engaged patients. Lack of awareness that the services existed, low perceived need for preparation, and anxiety or active avoidance of pre-surgical information all distinguished the non-engaged group at statistically significant levels. The qualitative responses put human faces on these statistics. Non-participants repeatedly offered explanations such as having no time due to work or, most damningly for hospital communication systems, that no one told them about the class. That a patient can reach the day of major surgery without ever learning that preparation programs exist points to a failure of outreach rather than a failure of patient motivation — a distinction with clear implications for how hospitals design their information flows.

On the facilitator side, the data were equally decisive. A strong recommendation from a healthcare provider was reported by 66.4 percent of engaged patients but only 23.5 percent of non-engaged patients, and family support showed a parallel pattern, cited by 49.6 percent of the engaged versus 13.6 percent of the non-engaged. Both differences were highly significant. In the open-ended responses, engaged patients emphasized wanting to be prepared and encouragement from doctors and family. Taken together, these findings suggest that patient engagement is not primarily a matter of individual personality or health literacy alone; it is a social process, catalyzed by clinicians who explicitly urge participation and by family members who provide both practical help and emotional reinforcement. A single sentence from a surgeon or nurse — a direct, personalized recommendation — appears to be among the most powerful levers available.

The consequences of engagement showed up in the patients’ psychological states. Those who participated in preoperative services had significantly lower preoperative anxiety scores and higher preparedness scores than those who did not. Anxiety was measured using the six-item short form of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, a validated instrument widely used in perioperative research. Lower anxiety before surgery is not merely a matter of comfort; elevated preoperative anxiety has been associated in the broader literature with poorer recovery experiences and higher postoperative pain perception. While a cross-sectional survey cannot prove that engagement causes reduced anxiety — it is equally plausible that less anxious patients are more inclined to engage — the association aligns with the mechanistic rationale for preoperative education and counseling, and it strengthens the case for prospective intervention trials.

To disentangle the independent effects of each factor, the team performed multivariate analysis, and the results sharpened the demographic profile of the engaged patient. Higher education doubled the odds of engagement, with an odds ratio of 2.16 and a 95 percent confidence interval of 1.17 to 3.99. Younger age modestly predicted engagement, with an odds ratio of 0.98 per year of age, and cardiac surgery patients had 3.67 times the odds of engaging compared with general surgery patients, with a confidence interval of 1.27 to 10.63. These predictors paint a familiar picture in health services research: engagement skews toward younger, better-educated patients, raising equity concerns. If preoperative programs genuinely improve outcomes, then the patients least likely to access them — older, less educated, and logistically burdened — may be those who stand to benefit the most, compounding existing disparities in surgical care.

The authors argue that their findings point toward concrete, testable interventions. Flexible scheduling could directly attack the time-constraint barrier, allowing working patients to attend sessions outside standard clinic hours or through remote formats. Enhanced patient education outreach — proactive communication at the moment surgery is scheduled, rather than passive availability of brochures — would address the awareness gap captured by the phrase no one told me about the class. And deliberately involving family supporters, perhaps by inviting a designated relative to education sessions, would harness the social facilitation effect the data reveal so clearly. None of these measures requires new drugs or expensive technology; they are organizational redesigns, which makes them unusually cost-effective candidates for implementation science.

The study’s limitations are worth keeping in view. It was conducted at a single large tertiary hospital in Changsha, so the specific engagement rates may not generalize to community hospitals or to health systems with different referral patterns and insurance structures. The cross-sectional design captures associations at one point in time and cannot establish causal direction between engagement and anxiety. Self-reported barriers are also subject to recall and social desirability biases. Nevertheless, the convergence of quantitative statistics and qualitative testimony gives the findings credibility, and the study was supported by the Medical Science Research Project of Hebei. For hospital administrators and perioperative teams, the message is actionable: the biggest obstacles between patients and better surgical preparation are missed conversations, rigid schedules and long journeys — problems that thoughtful service design can solve. As preoperative optimization programs such as enhanced recovery after surgery pathways continue to spread, ensuring that all patients, not just the young and well-connected, actually walk through the door may become one of the most important quality metrics in surgery.

Subject of Research: Barriers and facilitators to surgical patients' engagement in preoperative experience services

Article Title: Barriers and facilitators to surgical patients’ engagement in preoperative experience services: a cross-sectional survey

Article References: Qiang, H., Song, T., Ren, H., Yang, T., & Wang, H. (2026). Barriers and facilitators to surgical patients’ engagement in preoperative experience services: a cross-sectional survey. BMC Health Services Research. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-026-15777-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12913-026-15777-4

Keywords: patient engagement, preoperative care, surgery, health services research, prehabilitation, patient education, preoperative anxiety, cross-sectional survey, health communication, barriers and facilitators, elective surgery, hospital services

The scale of the question is difficult to overstate. Dementia affects tens of millions of people worldwide, and the World Health Organization has emphasized that most of those people eventually require some form of long-term care. Within care homes, person-centered dementia care—often abbreviated PCDC—represents a philosophical and practical shift away from task-driven routines toward care organized around each individual’s history, preferences, relationships and remaining abilities. The model asks staff to see the person, not merely the diagnosis, and to tailor everything from bathing routines to mealtime interactions to the unique identity of the resident. Decades of research suggest this approach can reduce distress, improve mood and enhance quality of life for people living with dementia. Yet implementing it consistently in facilities has proven remarkably difficult, and previous literature has lacked a comprehensive analysis of the barriers and facilitators specifically from the perspective of formal caregivers.

To close that gap, the research team conducted a systematic search of multiple databases covering the entire period from the inception of each database through 24 September 2025. They followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses, the internationally recognized PRISMA standards, to ensure the review was transparent and reproducible. The protocol was prospectively registered on PROSPERO, the international prospective register of systematic reviews, under registration number CRD420251167358—a step that guards against selective reporting and signals methodological rigor. After screening, 21 eligible studies made the final cut: 19 purely qualitative studies and 2 mixed-methods studies. The team assessed the methodological quality of the included work using established critical appraisal instruments, including the Critical Appraisal Skills Program checklist for qualitative research and the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool, and judged the overall quality of the evidence base to be relatively high.

The analytical engine of the review is the updated Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research, or CFIR, a widely used conceptual architecture in implementation science. Rather than leaving findings scattered across dozens of individual studies, the researchers mapped every extracted barrier and facilitator onto the framework’s five domains: characteristics of the innovation itself, the outer setting, the inner setting, the characteristics of the individuals involved, and the process of implementation. This mapping technique is what gives the review its power. It converts the messy, context-specific complaints and successes reported by caregivers in different countries and facilities into a structured, comparable taxonomy that managers and policymakers can act upon.

The results are striking in their asymmetry. Across the 21 studies, the team identified a total of 49 distinct implementation factors. Of these, 30 were barriers and only 19 were facilitators. That imbalance is itself a finding: formal caregivers perceive substantially more forces pushing against person-centered dementia care than supporting it. In other words, the default conditions of long-term care facilities appear to be tilted away from person-centered practice, and achieving it requires actively overcoming more obstacles than merely amplifying existing supports. For facility administrators, this suggests that simply encouraging staff to be more person-centered—without restructuring the environment in which they work—is unlikely to succeed.

Although the published abstract does not enumerate every factor, the framework’s five domains provide a scientifically grounded way to understand where those barriers and facilitators cluster. Within the innovation domain, questions arise about how complex person-centered care is to learn and deliver, and how compatible it is with existing care routines. The outer setting captures pressures from regulatory bodies, families and health systems. The inner setting encompasses the structural characteristics of facilities themselves—leadership, resources, staffing levels and available time. The individuals domain covers the knowledge, beliefs, self-efficacy and burnout of the formal caregivers whose daily behavior ultimately determines whether person-centered care happens or not. And the implementation process domain addresses how change is planned, resourced, executed and sustained over time. The 49 factors identified by the review distribute across these domains, giving managers a diagnostic map for their own institutions.

The perspective of formal caregivers is the review’s distinctive contribution. Previous syntheses have often centered the experiences of residents and families, or examined person-centered care from a purely clinical outcomes standpoint. By contrast, Zhang and colleagues deliberately foregrounded the voices of the workforce—the people who must translate an abstract care philosophy into thousands of small daily decisions. Their synthesis makes clear that implementation is not simply a matter of training. It is a systems problem in which individual motivation interacts with organizational culture, workload, leadership support and the broader policy environment. A caregiver may deeply believe in person-centered principles yet be unable to practice them when staffing is thin, routines are rigid, or leadership prioritizes efficiency metrics over relational care.

The practical implications flow directly from the framework mapping. Because the barriers and facilitators are organized by CFIR domain, managers can use the review as a checklist-style diagnostic to understand which forces are operating in their own facilities and to develop corresponding implementation strategies. The authors explicitly frame the work this way: the goal is to help managers understand the barriers and facilitators to implementing person-centered dementia care and to design strategies that bridge the persistent gap between evidence and practice. That gap—between what research shows is best for people living with dementia and what actually occurs at the bedside—is one of the most consequential implementation challenges in geriatric care, and structured frameworks like CFIR are the field’s main tools for closing it.

The review also carries methodological lessons for the research community. The relatively high methodological quality of the 21 included studies, verified through CASP and MMAT appraisal, suggests that the qualitative evidence base on this topic has matured considerably. At the same time, the predominance of barriers over facilitators hints that future primary research should focus not only on documenting problems but on identifying and rigorously evaluating the conditions under which person-centered care flourishes. The fact that the review was registered on PROSPERO before the search concluded, and that it followed PRISMA reporting standards, makes its findings a reliable foundation for such future work.

For the millions of families whose relatives live in long-term care facilities, the study’s message is quietly hopeful. The obstacles to humane, individualized dementia care are real, numerous and systemic—but they are now catalogued, categorized and mapped in a way that makes them actionable. Person-centered dementia care is not failing because caregivers do not care; it is failing, the synthesis suggests, because of identifiable and therefore fixable implementation factors spanning individuals, organizations and systems. With 30 barriers named and 19 facilitators illuminated, the path from gold standard to everyday standard has, for the first time, a comprehensive map. The full open-access review, including its supplementary materials, is available in BMC Nursing under DOI 10.1186/s12912-026-05464-4.

Subject of Research: Barriers and facilitators to implementing person-centered dementia care in long-term care facilities

Article Title: Barriers and facilitators to implementing person-centered dementia care in long-term care facilities: a qualitative meta-synthesis

Article References: Zhang, G., Wang, D., Xia, T., Cheng, Y., & Liu, L. (2026). Barriers and facilitators to implementing person-centered dementia care in long-term care facilities: a qualitative meta-synthesis. BMC Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-026-05464-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12912-026-05464-4

Keywords: person-centered care, dementia, long-term care facilities, qualitative meta-synthesis, implementation science, CFIR, formal caregivers, nursing homes, barriers and facilitators, BMC Nursing, PROSPERO, geriatric care

The research team, led by Elise Schoefs and Lauren Michiels of KU Leuven together with colleagues from University Hospitals Leuven, the Belgian IBD Nurses and Study Coordinators Association, and patient organization partners, conducted semi-structured interviews with fifteen patients with inflammatory bowel disease, eleven gastroenterologists, and twelve inflammatory bowel disease nurses across Belgium. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using a thematic framework method, an approach that allows researchers to systematically code and compare experiences across different stakeholder groups. The study received ethics approval from the Ethical Committee Research UZ/KU Leuven in November 2022, and all participants provided informed consent. Patient organizations, including the Crohn and Colitis ulcerosa Vereniging, helped recruit participants and refine study materials, ensuring that the perspectives captured were grounded in the lived realities of the disease community.

The central finding is a striking perceptual gap between clinicians and patients. Gastroenterologists reported that they routinely incorporate most steps of the shared decision making process into their consultations, describing a practice in which options are presented and preferences invited. Patients, however, described something messier and less consistent. Their accounts highlighted shortcomings in three particular domains: emotional support, clarity of information, and the elicitation of preferences. In other words, while doctors may believe they are offering choices, patients often experienced consultations in which their emotional state went unaddressed, the information provided was difficult to digest, and their own priorities were never explicitly asked about. This divergence matters because shared decision making is not merely a checklist of behaviors but a relational process, and if the two parties perceive the same conversation so differently, the process is unlikely to be functioning as intended.

One of the study’s most consequential findings concerns the role of the inflammatory bowel disease nurse. Across all three participant groups, nurses were viewed as essential partners in the decision making process, complementing rather than duplicating the work of gastroenterologists. Patients and clinicians alike described nurses as figures who reinforce information delivered in consultations, translate medical jargon into understandable terms, facilitate communication between the patient and the physician, and attend to physical, emotional, and social needs that a time-pressed specialist may not have the bandwidth to explore. In many chronic disease fields, specialist nurses have quietly become the connective tissue of care teams, and this study provides qualitative evidence that in inflammatory bowel disease, they are often the ones who make shared decision making practically achievable rather than merely aspirational.

The researchers also mapped the barriers that keep shared decision making from being implemented consistently. Low health literacy and limited disease-related knowledge among patients emerged as a major obstacle, since patients cannot meaningfully weigh options they do not understand. Poor communication between clinicians and patients compounded the problem, and time constraints within busy outpatient clinics surfaced repeatedly as a structural constraint that squeezes out the conversational space that genuine deliberation requires. These barriers are not unique to gastroenterology; they echo findings from shared decision making research across oncology, primary care, and chronic disease management. What the new study adds is a disease-specific account of how these forces interact in a condition whose treatment landscape, dominated by an expanding arsenal of biologics and small molecules, has grown dramatically more complex in the past decade.

Against these barriers, the study identified a set of facilitators that could accelerate adoption. Participants pointed to the perceived clinical and relational benefits of shared decision making, including improved quality of care, better patient adherence to treatment, and greater professional fulfillment for clinicians. Greater awareness of what shared decision making actually entails, and enhanced education for both patients and healthcare providers, were also seen as key enablers. The authors argue that demonstrating and promoting these intrinsic and consequential benefits may be one of the most effective levers for encouraging widespread adoption, since clinicians who experience the payoff of collaborative consultations are more likely to invest the additional effort they require.

The technical framing of the study draws on established implementation science. The researchers anchored their analysis in the Ottawa Model of Research Use, a framework for understanding how evidence-based practices are adopted in clinical settings, and reported their work according to the Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research, the standard checklist for rigor in qualitative studies. They also reference patient decision aids, structured tools designed to present treatment options and outcomes in balanced, comprehensible formats, as one potential mechanism for supporting the information exchange at the heart of shared decision making. The study’s conclusions point toward a combination of interventions: formal shared decision making training for clinicians, organizational changes that protect consultation time, and a deliberate strengthening and recognition of the inflammatory bowel disease nurse’s role within multidisciplinary teams.

Why does this matter beyond the gastroenterology clinic? Inflammatory bowel disease affects millions of people worldwide, and its prevalence is rising in newly industrialized countries. Because the disease is chronic, diagnosed most often in young adults, and managed through sequential treatment escalations, patients face recurring decision points over decades: whether to start a biologic, whether to switch therapies when response wanes, whether to pursue surgery, how to balance medication risks against pregnancy plans and career demands. Each of these decisions is preference-sensitive, meaning that reasonable people with the same clinical picture might reasonably choose differently. Preference-sensitive decisions are precisely where shared decision making delivers the greatest value, and precisely where its absence leaves patients feeling steamrolled or adrift.

The study’s multi-stakeholder design is also methodologically significant. Many evaluations of shared decision making rely on a single perspective, usually the clinician’s self-report or the patient’s survey response. By interviewing patients, gastroenterologists, and nurses separately and comparing their accounts, the Belgian team exposed the perception gap that single-perspective studies can miss. The finding that clinicians believe they are practicing shared decision making while patients experience inconsistency is not an accusation of bad faith; it is a well-documented phenomenon in implementation research, where self-reported practice tends to overestimate actual fidelity to a model. Closing that gap requires feedback, training, and structural support rather than exhortation alone.

The authors conclude that although shared decision making is widely recognized in inflammatory bowel disease care, its implementation remains inconsistent due to structural and interpersonal barriers, and they call for multi-stakeholder strategies to embed it more reliably. For health systems wrestling with how to make patient-centered care real rather than rhetorical, the study offers a concrete agenda: invest in nurse-led support structures, educate both sides of the consultation, protect the time that genuine deliberation demands, and measure whether patients, not just their physicians, actually experience decisions as shared. As biologics reshape what is possible in inflammatory bowel disease treatment, the question is no longer only which drug works best, but who gets a voice in choosing it.

Subject of Research: Shared decision making in inflammatory bowel disease care and the role of IBD nurses

Article Title: Shared decision making in inflammatory bowel disease: a qualitative study with patients, gastroenterologists, and nurses

Article References: Schoefs, E., Michiels, L., Straetemans, N., Ferrante, M., Verstockt, B., Sabino, J., Debrun, L., Loddewijkx, E., Van Audenhove, C., Vermeire, S., & Huys, I. (2026). Shared decision making in inflammatory bowel disease: a qualitative study with patients, gastroenterologists, and nurses. BMC Health Services Research. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-026-15552-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12913-026-15552-5

Keywords: inflammatory bowel disease, shared decision making, patient-centered care, IBD nurses, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, qualitative research, gastroenterology, health literacy, barriers and facilitators, biologics, health services research

The research, conducted by Jean C. Yi, Sheri Ballard, Emily Jo Artim, Casey Walsh, and K. Scott Baker at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, took a mixed methods approach, combining hard utilization data from the electronic health record with in-depth qualitative interviews. All participants were one to five years past the end of cancer treatment, a window when survivorship care is considered especially critical. The team queried the electronic health record to determine which survivors had been seen in the Survivorship Clinic, then conducted qualitative interviews with a randomly selected subset of participants drawn from a larger parent study testing a digital health intervention. That parent trial, known as INSPIRE—the INteractive survivorship program to improve health care REsources—is designed to test a digital intervention with stepped care telehealth to improve outcomes for adolescent and young adult survivors.

The demographic profile of the small group that did use the clinic was telling. Among the 38 clinic users, 86.8 percent were female, 71.1 percent were White, 86.8 percent were not Hispanic, and 65.7 percent had been treated for breast cancer. This skew toward female, White, and breast cancer populations raises questions about equitable reach, though the study’s primary focus was on understanding why utilization was so low across the board. The picture that emerged from the electronic health record was unambiguous: survivorship services, even when available at the very institution where these patients had been treated, were being used by fewer than one survivor in twenty.

To understand the reasons behind those numbers, the researchers screened a subset of 147 participants enrolled in the parent trial for approach to qualitative interviews, ultimately completing forty interviews. The interviewees had a mean age of 38.4 years, with half having had breast cancer; 78 percent were female, 83 percent were White, and 92 percent had attained a college degree or higher education. Despite being well educated and demographically similar to the clinic-using group, only one of the forty interview participants had ever visited the Survivorship Clinic. That single data point may be the most arresting in the study: even among survivors engaged enough to enroll in a survivorship research trial, virtually none had accessed the clinic down the hall.

Through content analysis of the interview transcripts, the researchers identified a set of barriers that fell into distinct but interconnected categories. The most significant was simple lack of awareness: many survivors simply did not know the survivorship clinic existed or what services it offered. This was compounded by avoidance—a psychological reluctance to confront cancer again after treatment had ended—and by lack of time, as young adults juggle careers, education, caregiving responsibilities, and the reestablishment of normal life. For a population at the busiest and most transitional stage of adulthood, an additional medical appointment that they had never heard of and did not fully understand carried little apparent urgency.

The interviews also illuminated what would have made a difference. Participants identified referrals from their oncology care teams, concrete information about the services the clinic provides, and the availability of telehealth as factors that would have facilitated them seeking survivorship care. In other words, the barriers were not primarily about motivation or health literacy alone; they were structural and communicative. Survivors needed a trusted clinician to tell them, at the end of treatment, that a survivorship clinic exists and why it matters. They needed to know what would happen during a visit—what late effects would be screened, what symptoms could be addressed, what psychosocial support was available. And they needed flexible access options compatible with the realities of young adult life, including remote participation.

The study arrives at a moment when survivorship care is being formalized at the national level. The National Standards for Cancer Survivorship Care propose health system policies to develop survivorship programs, and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network’s survivorship guidelines, updated in 2025, call for structured follow-up care including survivorship care plans. Yet this research shows that the existence of a clinic, even within a comprehensive cancer center, does not guarantee uptake. Prior work has documented low attendance among childhood cancer survivors and among Hodgkin lymphoma survivors, and studies of rural childhood cancer survivors have similarly pointed to awareness and access as limiting factors. The new study extends that evidence into the adolescent and young adult population, which is demographically and clinically distinct from both pediatric and older adult populations.

That distinctiveness is part of why the gap matters so much. Adolescents and young adults diagnosed with cancer face decades of life after cure, during which late effects—cardiac dysfunction, secondary malignancies, infertility, endocrine problems, cognitive changes, and psychosocial distress—may emerge and progress. Research has consistently shown that this age group experiences unique biology and unique psychosocial burdens, and that their survival gains have historically lagged behind those of children and older adults. Survivorship clinics are designed to catch these late effects early, coordinate surveillance, and connect survivors with interventions. When fewer than five percent of eligible survivors walk through the clinic door, the potential of that model goes largely unrealized, and preventable morbidity may accumulate silently for years.

The implications drawn by the authors are pointed. Lack of awareness of the survivorship clinic was the most significant barrier, and a referral from their oncology care team would have facilitated them scheduling a visit. This suggests a relatively low-cost, high-impact intervention: embedding an explicit survivorship referral into the standard end-of-treatment workflow, paired with clear patient-facing information about what the clinic offers and telehealth options to reduce logistical friction. The study’s connection to the INSPIRE digital health trial also hints at a broader strategy—meeting young survivors where they already are, on their phones, rather than waiting for them to find a clinic they have never heard of. As health systems implement national survivorship standards, the lesson of this study is that building clinics is only half the task; the other half is making sure the patients who need them know they exist.

For survivors themselves, the message is equally practical: late effects are real, monitoring is worthwhile, and help is available beyond the end of treatment. For oncology teams, the message is that the handoff from active treatment to survivorship care cannot be left to chance. A single sentence from a trusted oncologist—a referral, an explanation, an invitation—may be the difference between a young survivor who falls through the cracks and one who receives the long-term surveillance that modern cancer care promises. With 4.5 percent utilization as the baseline, there is enormous room for improvement, and this study offers a clear, evidence-based map of where to begin.

Subject of Research: Utilization of survivorship clinics by adolescent and young adult cancer survivors

Article Title: A mixed methods study of adolescent and young adult cancer survivors and their utilization of a survivorship clinic: Barriers and facilitators

Article References: Yi, J. C., Ballard, S., Artim, E. J., Walsh, C., & Baker, K. S. (2026). A mixed methods study of adolescent and young adult cancer survivors and their utilization of a survivorship clinic: Barriers and facilitators. Journal of Cancer Survivorship. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11764-026-02125-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11764-026-02125-y

Keywords: adolescent and young adult oncology, cancer survivorship, survivorship clinic, late effects, mixed methods, qualitative interviews, telehealth, health care utilization, barriers and facilitators, cancer survivorship care standards, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, digital health intervention